Andrew McKie: Scotland is left-of-centre - just one of the daft claims made about this country

Andrew McKie: Scotland is left-of-centre - just one of the daft claims made about this country

“HERE’S to us, wha’s like us? Damn few and they’re all halfwits on social media telling us what we’re allowed to think.”

OK, not the catchiest toast ever. But the one we really ought to deliver as we raise our glasses of repulsive low-calorie, new recipe Irn-Bru or minimum-priced whisky.

The whisky is costing us twice over, some people will tell you; strangely, often the same people who approve of minimum pricing. If it’s exported through an English port, according to them, the export duty gets paid into the UK’s coffers, and Scotland loses out. Since there’s no such thing as export duty, this is easily disproven.

There are several similar quickly fact-checked and, it turns out, idiotic views from all sectors of the political spectrum. Some (Brexit will give us back control of £350 million a week) may be very strictly speaking true, and then (all of which we can spend on the NHS) demonstrably mad. SNP forecasts of an oil price of $120-150 a barrel that would fund independence in 2014, just before the price fell to $20-25 a barrel, were similarly not untrue, but just as fanciful.

No political side is immune from this sort of thing. The one which mystifies me, however, is the surety of those who know what the will of the Scottish people is, always has been, and is certain to be. Some of it, to be sure, has been trotted out for years. But it’s still often demonstrable nonsense.

Take the claim that Scottish political culture has always been different and that Westminster bullies a population with different priorities.

Hardly anyone seems to acknowledge that until less than ten years ago, Scotland’s votes for the Commons were by and large in line with those of the dominant UK parties (and that it was only devolution and PR that changed the make-up at Holyrood).

For most of the past 160 years, when we’ve been out of step with the rest of the UK, it’s not been by much. Certainly not wildly out of line with the North-East of England, Wales, or Devon and Cornwall. And since Scotland has been at the most about 10 per cent of the UK’s population during that period, is it so very odd that we’re occasionally on the minority side of a popular vote?

For ten years before this apparent divergence, we had one of the most powerfully devolved assemblies or parliaments in Europe. Almost all claims that the Scottish Parliament can’t do something that doesn’t involve foreign policy, nuclear defence or some other UK-wide issue, are false. Schools? The NHS? Policing? All entirely devolved.

Another myth is that Scotland is fundamentally Socialist and left-of-centre and was written off by Margaret Thatcher’s government. That, in recent years, has been accepted as axiomatic but strikes me as odd, given that the collapse in the Tory vote didn’t happen under Mrs Thatcher.

The popular vote for the Tories went up in 1979 and 1992 but fell really dramatically only after John Major came to power and tanked the economy by trying to join the ERM. Mrs Thatcher certainly lost some votes in Scotland, but is anyone suggesting she had no admirers here? Even now, the Tories attract the second-highest number of votes.

Claim three, and the one that those claims rest on, and which the previous examples already prove are silly in the extreme: Scotland has a homogeneous “cultural” view.

When it comes down to it, I’m sorry to say, this is dangerously close to racism, even – in fact, especially – because it cloaks itself in inclusiveness. Scots have a good record in welcoming immigrants from other cultures and these newer Scots make a vigorous and useful contribution to our economy and cultural life.

But, under the current dispensation, almost everyone is now to be judged on whether they’re “Scottish” enough. The SNP is now decrying the Westminster government’s points-based policy (in fact, a rather more liberal one than they themselves advocated in their manifesto), as “racist” – which presumably means “not keen enough on the SNP”.

Seeing the EU as fundamentally undemocratic, or thinking that UK control of immigration (even if it means letting in more people from Commonwealth countries) is, according to the SNP, un-Scottish.

This will come as a surprise to many of us. It seems to be an attitude conjured out of thin air and prejudice, rather like the linguistic rule that Scotch applies only to food and drink, and the adjective is otherwise Scots or Scottish. This was invented in the 1960s on no basis whatsoever: it would certainly have baffled Scottish writers like Scott or Buchan.

Of course, it’s a harmless stylistic preference you’re perfectly welcome, and thanks to it now being the norm, probably wise to adopt. But it’s not a rule. Applying similarly daft and prejudiced policing of “proper” Scottish political thought is a much more outrageous and dangerous proposition.

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